The Triumph of Nancy Reagan

by Karen Tumulty

  Barbara Bush did not disguise how happy she was to see the indignities and humiliations that she and her husband had suffered at Nancy’s hand finally come to an end. At one point, Barbara spotted Ronnie’s ever-present executive assistant, Jim Kuhn, standing in the backstage holding area of the Capitol. She swept Kuhn up in a big hug and gave him a kiss. Then, in a tone that sounded more triumphant than sentimental, she told him: “Jim… good-bye.” Kuhn was taken aback. He got the message, he told me later. It was one that Barbara wanted to deliver to the entire Reagan team: “Good riddance. Get out of here. We don’t want to see you again.”

  After the inauguration of the forty-first president, the Bushes and the Quayles accompanied the Reagans to the helicopter that would carry them to a waiting government Boeing 707 at Andrews AFB. It was set to take off not as Air Force One—that name was used only if a sitting president was aboard—but as Special Air Mission 27000. The chopper was designated Nighthawk One, not Marine One. As Nancy got ready to climb in, the now-former first lady spotted a figure standing by himself to one side. It was George Opfer. Nancy broke away and ran over to embrace the Secret Service agent who had shared the darkest day of her life with her back in March 1981.

  Then they lifted off. The helicopter pilot made an extra circle over the White House, so the Reagans could see it one more time. Tears covered Nancy’s cheeks as the couple gazed out the window. “Look, dear,” Ronnie said tenderly, “there’s our little bungalow.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  On the first working day after his return to California, Ronald Reagan surprised his staff by showing up at his new suite of offices in Century City. The place wasn’t even ready yet. When they got word that the former president was on his way, his chief of staff, Fred Ryan, and the others scrambled to throw some pictures on the wall and hide the boxes they had been unpacking. “Well, I’m going to work on some things,” Ronnie said cheerily when he arrived, and then he disappeared into his private office. A few hours later, he emerged and handed Ryan a list of nearly a dozen names. “I’ve agreed to see these people,” Ronnie said. Ryan was perplexed. He didn’t recognize any of them.

  “They’re people who’ve been calling,” Ronnie explained. The phone system had not been properly connected and calls into the office were going straight through to the ex-president himself. Most were inquiries from members of the public, who were surprised to hear Ronnie’s familiar voice on the other end of the line, and even more startled to get an invitation to come over and meet him. The harried scheduling team honored the commitments that Ronnie had made to these strangers. “They came in. They got their picture taken. They brought their kids in,” Ryan recalled. “One guy turned to me and said, ‘This is pretty cool.’ He said, ‘My neighbor likes Ronald Reagan. I think I’m going to bring him in.’ I said, ‘No, you got lucky once. Not twice.’ ” Ryan also made sure the phones got fixed and that future calls to the main number would be routed to a receptionist.

  Ronnie and Nancy had looked forward to this phase of their life. The end of his presidency was “a bittersweet experience,” he said. Returning to California was “the sweet part of it.” He pronounced their new Bel Air home, one of the smaller and plainer ones in the ultrarich neighborhood, his favorite of all the houses in which they had lived. He would have more time to spend at his beloved ranch. Nancy would be back among her closest friends. There was even speculation that they might go back into the movies, though Nancy put that to rest when she told celebrity interviewer Joan Rivers, “I don’t think I’m right for today’s films.”

  Their future could hardly have looked more secure. Ronnie, by all appearances hale and healthy as he approached his eightieth birthday, enjoyed the distinction of being the only living president to have been elected twice and exited the office in good standing. His final job approval rating in the Gallup poll was a robust 63 percent. On the last day of his presidency, Ronnie received a letter from Richard Nixon congratulating him: “Politics is a roller coaster, and you ended right at the top!” Less than forty-eight hours later, Ronnie signed a deal with Simon & Schuster to write two books, reportedly for around $5 million.

  The Reagans soon were traveling the world in the near-royal style that ex-presidents are afforded. In June 1989 he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and feted by Margaret Thatcher at a dinner at 10 Downing Street. On that same weeklong trip, he was inducted into France’s prestigious Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. The following month, he stepped in as a guest announcer for the first inning of baseball’s annual All-Star Game in Anaheim—a return to his earliest professional roots—and a month after that was named to the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma.

  Meanwhile, Ronnie got the satisfaction of seeing a new world begin to take shape as the result of things that he had helped to make happen. In 1990, three years after he had demanded that Gorbachev “tear down this wall,” he went to Berlin and took a hammer and chisel to its remnants. Crowds chanted, “We love you, Ronnie!” A nine-foot-tall segment of the wall would later stand on the terrace of his presidential library. He was also welcomed at the Gdansk shipyards in Poland, where the anti-Communist Solidarity movement had been formed. Sanctions imposed by the Reagan administration were widely credited with forcing the government to make democratic concessions. Solidarity’s founder, Lech Walesa, told Ronnie: “Your position, firmness, and consistency meant hope and help for us in the most difficult moments.”

  In May 1992 Gorbachev, who was overthrown in a coup by Communist hard-liners after the fall of the Soviet Union, spoke at the newly opened Reagan Library and received the first Ronald Reagan Freedom Award. He also paid a nostalgic visit to the Reagans at their ranch. Ronnie gave Gorbachev a Stetson, which he put on. No one had the nerve to tell the former Soviet leader that he was wearing the hat backward.

  These high-profile, postpresidency victory laps were as important to Nancy as they were to Ronnie. Of the two of them, she had always been the one more focused on his place in history. “He was the last guy who cared about this; about making sure that his legacy was known and remembered,” Fred Ryan said. “He was not one who was spending a lot of time worrying about his legacy. Even before he had a health problem, she was more involved in those conversations.”

  Ronnie went to the office almost every weekday that he wasn’t traveling. Nancy preferred to work mostly from home. Getting his presidential library off the ground was a major endeavor for both of them. Both of them were determined that it would be the biggest and the best of any.

  * * *

  In their reentry to private life, the Reagans also made some controversial judgments, leading them into rough patches. The first misstep was Ronnie’s decision to accept $2 million from a Japanese media conglomerate for an eight-day speaking tour of that country in October 1989. Gerald Ford had paved the way for selling the prestige of the presidency, quietly lining his pockets with lucrative posts on corporate boards. Six-figure speaking fees for former presidents would later become common. But at the time, it was considered shocking for one to cash in so blatantly on the aura of the office. Ronnie’s immediate predecessor, Jimmy Carter, was keeping himself busy by building houses for the poor. Even disgraced Richard Nixon was coming to be regarded as a dignified elder statesman, writing heavyweight books about foreign policy, traveling internationally, and offering advice that his successors and other leaders were eager to hear, though they did not publicize it.

  “Former Presidents haven’t always comported themselves with dignity after leaving the Oval Office,” the New York Times sniffed in an editorial about Ronnie’s lucrative Japanese speaking gig. “But none have plunged so blatantly into pure commercialism.” Oregon congressman Peter DeFazio, a Democrat, introduced legislation to eliminate an ex-president’s pension after any year in which he earns more than $400,000. “It’s unseemly, to say the least, when a former president cashes in on his prestige this way, and doubly so when he continues to receive his full presidential pension,” DeFazio said. Ronnie’s s
uccessor, George H. W. Bush, commented wryly: “Everybody’s got to make a living.”

  The Reagans even had to endure humiliating gibes from the man who in the late 1980s was the walking embodiment of classless, undignified merchandising of a public image. In January 1990, a few months after the Reagans’ Japan trip, Donald Trump made an appearance at a charity event in Los Angeles and noted that Ronnie was present as a guest. “President Reagan is here, and I can tell this audience he did not get two million for coming here tonight,” Trump said. “You didn’t get $2 million for this, did you, Mr. President?” Nancy leaned over to someone sitting near her, and asked incredulously: “Did he really say what I think he said?”

  The previous year, Trump had attended a fund-raiser for the Reagan Library that was held in New York Harbor aboard Malcolm Forbes’s yacht, the Highlander. Forbes and Reagan friend Walter Annenberg took the brash real estate tycoon below deck and made their pitch for a $1 million contribution. They were disappointed when Trump agreed to give only $25,000—and even more so when the money never showed up.

  Ronnie was not the only Reagan who drew criticism in the months after the former first couple left Washington. Nancy had pledged to continue her crusade against drugs, and one of her most high-profile endeavors was the construction of a 210-bed treatment center that was to be named for her. The Reagans’ wealthy friends held a series of glittering, high-dollar fund-raisers to benefit the effort. However, the middle-class homeowners who lived near the proposed San Fernando Valley site did not want it there and threatened to picket the Reagans’ Bel Air home in retaliation. Abruptly, Nancy withdrew her support for the project. “The last thing I wanted to do was upset a community,” she said.

  Her reversal in May 1989 left Phoenix House, the program that was to run the center, in the lurch. The group had collected only half of the $5 million that Nancy had raised in pledges, and dozens of the big donors asked for their money back. Appearances weren’t helped by the fact that, just days after abandoning the rehabilitation center, Nancy accepted a lucrative seat on the board of the cosmetics giant Revlon. Vanity Fair wrote a scathing account of the Phoenix House saga, which questioned the sincerity of Nancy’s commitment to the antidrug cause: “Although Mrs. Reagan has consented to the occasional photo opportunity since leaving office, for the most part she seems to be devoting her energies to making money.” Among the most blistering quotes in the article was one from powerful television executive Grant Tinker, a member of the Phoenix House board. “We were just about to cross the goal line, and she shot us down,” he said. “I think she thinks the ‘Just Say No’ thing is national and effective. It isn’t; it’s just a lapel button. It isn’t what Phoenix House does, which is constructive and effective.”

  Nancy’s book My Turn: The Memoirs of Nancy Reagan also came out near the end of 1989, to withering reviews. First ladies before her had written anodyne and unrevealing accounts, aimed more at proving that they hadn’t overstepped their traditional roles than showing how they had. Nancy’s book was regarded as so vindictive that it quickly became known as “My Burn.” But she was unapologetic. “Well,” she said, “if I’d written a book like Lady Bird Johnson’s, why write it? Lord, eight years is a long time to sit there and not say anything.”

  Its candor is striking. In My Turn, Nancy is defensive, both of her decisions and the way in which she chose to play the role in which history had cast her. The book also glosses over events and denies some things that are clearly true, such as the fact that she waged a guerrilla campaign against Don Regan with strategic leaks to the press. But Nancy’s assessments of the people around her husband come off as pretty close to the mark. And she is forthright in admitting that she made her share of mistakes, bringing many of her problems—and heartbreak—upon herself.

  The book’s dedication is poignant in that regard:

  To Ronnie, who always understood

  And to my children, who I hope will understand.

  Its passages about the strains within the Reagan family stand out as particularly raw. “What I wanted most in all the world was to be a good wife and mother. As things turned out, I guess I’ve been more successful at the first than at the second,” Nancy acknowledged. But she was also unsparing in airing her grievances against the four Reagan offspring, particularly Patti, with whom she was not on speaking terms at the time the book was published. Sally Quinn, reviewing it in the Washington Post, wrote: “What is appalling is the way she attacks her own child. It is so hurtful, so painful, so embarrassing, so pathetic that it takes your breath away.”

  Nancy’s book, however, was only one in a stream of uncomfortable Reagan-era remembrances to hit the bookstands in those years. There was astrologer Joan Quigley’s 1990 volume “What Does Joan Say?” The truth, which was that she was consulted on presidential scheduling decisions, was weird enough. But in her book, Quigley took credit for everything from the warming of US-Soviet relations, to calming the controversy over Ronnie’s visit to the Bitburg cemetery, to ensuring the confirmation of a nominee to the US Supreme Court. Many of her claims—“I was the Teflon in the Teflon presidency,” she wrote—were absurd.

  That same year, former speechwriter Peggy Noonan came out with What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era, a snarky, almost anthropological look at the Reagan years. At times, Noonan wrote, it seemed that “the battle for the mind of Ronald Reagan was like the trench warfare of World War I: never have so many fought so hard for such barren terrain.” His White House, in Noonan’s telling, was “like a beautiful clock that makes all the right sounds, but when you open it up, there is nothing inside.” Noonan posited that Nancy was “a wealthy, well-dressed woman who followed the common wisdom of her class” and “disliked the contras because they were unattractive and dirty.”

  Despite what Noonan had dished in the book, she and Nancy would eventually become close. Mutual friends brought them together over dinner in the mid-1990s, shortly after Ronnie was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Noonan was surprised to discover how much she liked Nancy. “Everything somehow was changed, and I just wanted to put my arm around her and appreciate her,” Noonan recalled later. “Because suddenly I saw what it had cost her; had always cost her. And I wanted to say, ‘Thank you.’ ”

  But that kind of reassessment of Nancy would not come for years. In the meantime, she endured criticism from many directions, some of them unexpected. Around the same time that Noonan’s caustic book was published, Selwa “Lucky” Roosevelt, who had been chief of protocol, joined the pile-on with her memoir titled Keeper of the Gate. Roosevelt castigated the former first lady on a number of fronts, one of which was the quality of the entertainment she chose for state dinners. “Our foreign guests were often subjected to has-been popular singers and other marginal performers who were not up to White House standards,” Roosevelt lamented.

  By the first anniversary of the Reagans’ triumphant departure from Washington, Los Angeles magazine had pronounced them “the most unpopular First Couple in history.” In November 1991 a Los Angeles Times poll found that more than two-thirds of the American public viewed Ronnie as an average or below-average president.

  That same year, Kitty Kelley’s blockbuster takedown of the former first lady came out. Kelley was well known for unflattering books she had written about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra. Nancy Reagan: The Unauthorized Biography was more than six hundred pages of gossip, salacious tidbits, and heavy innuendo. Nancy was portrayed as a shallow social climber, an uncaring parent, and the manipulative force behind a dim-brained president. Among the most headline-grabbing—and specious—claims was Kelley’s suggestion that Nancy and Frank Sinatra had a long-term sexual affair.

  Kelley had done extensive research and uncovered fresh material that shed new light on some of the broad outlines of Nancy’s life, particularly its complicated beginnings. But every fact that the author dug up was turned in a single direction, to make the case that Nancy was a vain a
nd cruel shrew with no redeeming qualities. A review in the New York Times deemed it “one of the most encyclopedically vicious books in the history of encyclopedic viciousness.” Which pretty much guaranteed that people would rush to buy it. Bookstores sold out within hours, with some reporting it was the fastest-moving volume they had ever seen. The first printing of 600,000 was shipped within a day, and by the end of a week, there were 925,000 copies in print. In Washington, the book was on everyone’s lips. Barbara Bush denounced it as “trash and fiction,” but Nancy’s successor as first lady was reported to have been spotted reading a copy disguised with a different dust jacket.

  Nancy was devastated. In several letters Ronnie wrote around the time, he alluded to the intensity of his wife’s distress. “A big thank-you for your letter and thank Pat also. Nancy and I are truly upset and angry over the total dishonesty of Kitty Kelley and her book,” he wrote former president Nixon on April 11. “We haven’t found one person she names as her sources who has ever known her or been contacted by her. Believe it or not, one she named was the minister of our church—Reverend Donn Moomaw. He has written a denial for the church bulletin. Your letter will help me keep Nancy from worrying herself sick. She is Kelley’s main victim and is very upset.”

  Reagan allies organized a pushback campaign. There is a file box among Nancy’s personal papers at the Reagan Library that comprises scores of letters that she received. Many were from people who were quoted in Kelley’s book, claiming either that their words were taken out of context or that they had never been interviewed by Kelley at all. Typical was one from actor Robert Stack, dated April 11, 1991, expressing his dismay at learning he was one of the hundreds of people cited in the book’s acknowledgments, which suggested he had been a source to Kelley. “Since I have never met or spoken to the woman, this would be impossible,” Stack wrote. In another, Broadway and film star Carol Channing fumed: “It has been called to my attention that I am quoted by Kitty Kelly [sic] in her book & I feel compelled to tell you that I have never spoken to her or any of her representatives. I was alarmed to see that she completely fabricated a malicious story.”